Here’s Why You Should Use Competency Management for Manufacturing Units

by Pooja Mishra

on September 07, 2016

Training & retaining employees are crucial in maintaining quality, efficiency and safety in a manufacturing unit whether you own a small workshop or a huge factory. Ensuring a training and retention plan for staff in place along with adherence to regulatory compliances is a prerequisite. But, manufacturing industry offers a challenging environment. Each unit faces a unique set of situations. The staff may lack process knowledge or essential skills to execute assignments efficiently. Add on to it, strict industry standards like OSHA, GMP and ISO. Hence, making training managers consider elearning to manage L&D initiatives and address all requirements within demanding production schedules.

Here are some clear takeaways from a Learning Management Solution for a manufacturing unit:

Competency Management

Over the past few years organisations have started deploying software to manage the skill set of employees. It helps to analyze competency related data of employees and help users identify skills, enable collaboration & knowledge sharing.

Having a competency management solution in organisation lets you identify the staff skill set and conduct skill-gap analysis. A custom e-learning solution lets you design platform to suit specific regulatory compliances like ISO, GMP and OSHA requirements as well. It delivers regulatory requirements in form of training modules. Thus retaining employees, managing regulations, realizing efficiencies and reduced cases of non-compliances.

Employee Orientation

Conceptually, it is a task of introducing a new employee to the working environment and sharing with them the basic information like company’s operating procedures, policies, and guidelines.

A Learning Management Solution (LMS) lets you automate employee orientation process and training completely so that you can focus on attaining production and shipping deadlines, against managing resources for training. The benefit of having an LMS extends to all departments not only production & operations. For instance, an LMS can effectively facilitate product based trainings for sales team and enhance their knowledge on product range, features and USPs.

An LMS lets you effectively organise, manage training and offer induction material in offices and plants across geographical locations. It lets you include text, presentations, audio, video & images in the program to make it engaging and adaptive for employees. You can create tests to map learnings and get detailed statistics for the individual performances as well.

Training

An e-learning course in production unit makes it easier to adapt to varying training needs. For instance, a unit may witness a sudden surge in product demand, resulting in replanning of production schedules, new hiring including temporary staff to meet the seasonal demand or a big order.

Having an e-learning course lets you adapt to increased training needs all in cost effective manner. An online training course allows staff to take training at their own pace while minimizing disruptions in production schedules. Such training courses further allow you to accommodate technological or policy related changes in training easily and share instantly with employees across organisation globally.

With a responsive, cloud-based solution, your employees further get the flexibility to run training program through various devices from different locations.

Employee Retention

All organizations have a set of employees whose experience is crucial for ensuring smooth operations, or to handle some special crisis situation. Retaining such employees is important. Apart from offering higher salary and designation, training can also do the needful.

An online training program facilitates individual competency development in technical and managerial areas. You can plan, organize and allocate specific training modules to achieve individual needs and help them grow within the organization along with offering challenging roles.

Real-Time Updates

An LMS makes it easy for manufacturing units to update training courses easily. With an online program, you can tweak the training module to accommodate recent changes in organizational policy or industry standards. This ensures staff compliance with latest changes in rules, shifts and policy.

Final Thoughts

Employees in the manufacturing industry require compliance, safety, process, Lean manufacturing, technical training and more. With an online training solution, it becomes easy to manage all such L&D initiatives effectively. It further enables active engagement of factory floor and warehouse employees which remain crucial to any manufacturing unit.

Looking for a modern, capable online training solution for your manufacturing industry training needs? Contact us to help you create a custom solution that’s unique to your business and requirements.